Don’t say we don’t tell you, readers.
Because we do tell you.
We told you a year and a quarter ago.
(Remember that time when Humza Yousaf was First Minister? It happened, honestly.)
We told you again seven months ago.
And we mentioned it again seven weeks ago.
And, y’know, we’re always pleased when the mainstream press finally catches up with us. The Times had a comment on the matter from Prof. James Mitchell.
And gee, if only there was some evidence indicating the SNP had indeed accepted that “independence was off the agenda for the foreseeable future”.
The story came in the wake of an opinion poll suggesting that the winter fuel allowance cut had severely damaged Scottish Labour and put the SNP back ahead in the polls.
But the figures didn’t actually change the arithmetic in any significant way from our original post last June. They still show a Labour-SNP alliance as the only way to a viable government. The only remotely plausible other options would all fail to get across the line of 65 that lets an administration pass any bills:
LABOUR+LIB DEM+GREEN: 50 seats (15 short of majority)
LABOUR+LIB DEM+TORIES: 57 seats (8 short)
SNP+GREEN: 56 seats (9 short)
(We think it’s safe to discount any coalition that included both the Greens and the Tories – which in any event would still only command 59 seats – and teaming up with Reform would probably be too much for even Scottish Labour to contemplate. Similarly, even if the SNP could rope in both the Greens and the Lib Dems – a wildly unlikely proposition in all sorts of ways – they’d still only be on 64.)
So while Humza Yousaf has been booted out, everything we told you a year and a quarter ago still holds true, and is likely to still hold true whatever fluctuations there might be in the polls in the next 18 months. In the absence of spectacular unforeseen developments, neither of the two big parties have any credible prospect of being able to form a majority coalition with anyone but each other.
As Wings has painstakingly documented, the SNP have been doing the groundwork to prepare their supporters for this final betrayal for some considerable time, and they clearly now feel ready to send a canary into the coalmine to see how it goes down.
McDonald – someone absolutely no serious person believes has any true commitment to Scottish independence, and who has nothing to lose since being unceremoniously ejected by voters in July – was the ideal candidate, and he didn’t hold back, making clear that the proposal was to dump the idea for at least the next 10 years.
(He couldn’t stop himself saying “decade” over and over for emphasis.)
Frankly we’d still have a few quid on McDonald just outright jumping ship to Labour if he doesn’t manage to wangle himself an SNP list seat in 2026. But one way or another he’s absolutely desperate to be on their team.
We’d love to believe that view wasn’t reflective of the Parliamentary SNP as a whole. But the evidence has been building up and building up for a long time now, getting steadily more and more blatant.
And sometimes things are just what they look like.
